29 quotes
Every six or seven years there is a great harvest of piñones far to the east of town. That harvest, like the deer in the mountains, is the gift of God.
House Made of Dawn (1968)
YAHWEH
Nothing will come of [evolution], as it has come from nothing.
In the Bear's House (1999)
The sun is at home on the plains. Precisely there does it have the certain character of a god.
The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969)
The imaginative experience and the historical express equally the traditions of man's reality.
The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969)
The stories that I keep close... are those that yield more and more of their spirit in time.
The Man Made of Words (1997)
Bear is an impractical visionary. His eyesight is weak, but he sees beyond the edge of the world, beyond time...
In the Bear's House (1999)
And the journey is an evocation of... a landscape that is incomparable, a time that is gone forever, and the human spirit, which endures.
The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969)
Eleven magpies standing in the plain.
They are illusion—wind and rain revolve—
And they recede in the darkness, and dissolve.
The Names: A Memoir (1976)
There is a perfect freedom in the mountains, but it belongs to the eagle and the elk, the badger and the bear. The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could see...
The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969)
Make beautiful all that is before me.
Make beautiful all that is behind me.
The Man Made of Words (1997)
There have been times when I thought I understood how it was that a man might be moved to preserve the bones of a horse—and another to steal them away.
The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969)
There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting.
House Made of Dawn (1968)
Riding is an exercise of the mind. I dreamed a good deal on the back of my horse, going out into the hills alone.
In the Presence of the Sun (1992)
Robie Ellis... said of Anne Elizabeth's children, his grandchildren: They will all be hanged by the time they are twenty for their damned Indian blood.
The Names: A Memoir (1976)
If an arrow is well made it will have tooth marks on it. ...The Kiowas ...straightened them with their teeth. Then they drew them to the bow to see that they were straight.
The Man Made of Words (1997)
I know how much he loved that animal; I think I know what was going on in his mind: If you will give me my life and the life of my family, I will give you the life of this black-eared horse.
The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969)
Now and then in winter, great angles of geese fly through the valley, and then the sky and the geese are the same color and the air is hard and damp and smoke rises from the houses of the town.
House Made of Dawn (1968)
In the winter dusk I heard coyotes barking away by the river, the sound of the drums in the kiva, and the voice of the village crier, ringing at the rooftops.
In the Presence of the Sun (1992)
I was embarked upon the greatest adventure of all; I had come to the place of my growing up.
In the Presence of the Sun (1992)
YAHWEH
[Poetry] is the highest of all languages... higher even than mathematics. It is on a plane with music.
In the Bear's House (1999)